Hamlet & To His Coy Mistress

Cultural Studies in Practice:

Hello friends,

Earlier we discussed about introduction of cultural studies and five types of cultural studies. Now, Let’s have a deeper insight through cultural studies in practice.

Ruchi Joshi’s blog on ‘Introduction of cultural studies’

Ruchi Joshi’s blog on ‘Five types of cultural studies’

Cultural Studies derives from the structuralism and post-structuralism, it tries to read everything in power structure within the power itself.

Marginalization is a slippery term, is used to define unequal power relations. If we are saying that now we are successful in abolishing of marginalization, colonialism and even in other social hierarchies, let me be very clear, we are merely in illusion. Marginalization and colonialism exists even today but the problem is that earlier we were able to distinguish this social turmoil and social evils which supports to power structure that are hierarchies, class and class systems of society. Marginalization still operates us in newer way. How? If we look at the HAMLET by Shakespeare if we ever want to study two characters who are marginalized, then suddenly two characters take place are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Even if we ever wished to perform the play and we need to cut down some of the parts of HAMLET hardly any other name will spark to us rather than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

As we know, both the characters are marginalized and even neglected too in the play by Shakespeare as thus also by even Hamlet! It would be surprising to know lens of Cultural studies says that both the characters are marginalized and pawns also in Tom Stoppard’s absurd play ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.’  Though the whole play is narrated through the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are at the periphery.

Here, Derrida is piping relentlessly in my mind that

“Center is paradoxically within the structure and outside it…the totality, has its center elsewhere.”

Now, let us expand our response to HAMLET by looking at a related cultural and philosophical manifestation from the twentieth century. In Stoppard’s version, they are even more obviously two ineffectual pawns, seeking constantly to know who they are they here, where they are doing. What there they ‘are’ at all may be the ultimate question of this modern play. In short, a cultural and historical view that was Shakespeare’s is radically reworked to reflect a cultural and philosophical view of another time – our own.

Thus, we allude to the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns, the little people who have been caught up in the corporate downsizing and mergers in recent decades- the effects on these

Literature is criticism of life & mirror of society but it proves right only when it reflects x-ray image of reality and also of society. As Warner says,

‘History is textual and text is historical’ Major cultural concern of ‘To his coy mistress’ is to study implied culture versus historical fact.

How do we understand the ‘speaker’ in ‘To his coy mistress’?

We know that the speaker is knowledgeable about poems and conventions of classic Greek and Roman literature, about other conventions of love poetry, such as the courtly love conventions of medieval Europe, and about Biblical passages. 

Jules Brody studies.....

‘implied reader of this poem distinct from the ‘fictive lady’ – he would be ‘able to summon up a certain number of earlier or contemporaneous examples of this kind of love poem and who could be counted on, in short, to supply the models which Marvell may variously have been evoking, imitating, distorting, subverting or transcending.’    

-‘The Resurrection of the Body: A New reading of Marvell’s ‘To his coy Mistress’

Why do we infer all these things?

We can say that the speaker and listener like poet Andrew Marvell – are highly educated persons – those well read, whose natural flow of associated images moves lightly over details and allusions that reflect who they are – and expects listeners and readers to respond in a kind of harmonic vibration because the speaker the speaker thinks in terms of precious stones, of exotic and distant places, of a milieu where eating, drinking, and making merry seem to be an achievable way of life.

What does it ignore from the culture?

·        It does not think of poverty, the demographics and socio-economic details of which would show how fortunate his circumstances are.

·        It does not think of disease as a daily reality that he might face.

·        It shows that wealth and leisure and sexual activity are his currency, his coin for present bliss.

Historical realities, a dimension that the poem ignores

·        Disease

Real and present disease

What has been called the ‘chronic morbidity’ of the population.

·        Syphilis

Syphilis and other sexual transmitted disease were as real a phenomenon in Marvell’s day as in our era.

·        Plague

More ominous, more wrenching, in its grasp of mind and body of the general population

Thank you.